Expansion of network infrastructures for computers and telephones has increased opportunities for personal connectivity. Email, voice mail, instant messaging (IM), short messaging service (SMS), wireless telephony, paging, facsimile (fax), and voice-over-IP (VoIP), to name a few, are communications “media” that offer a person numerous avenues for contacting and conversing with another.
Message format can be distinguished from transport mechanisms for sending a message and this distinction is accentuated by transposition engines that can turn text content into speech and vice versa. A message can be transported to a recipient by any number of communications media. Thus, message format does not automatically specify or limit the message to a particular transport medium.
Often, a person composing and preparing to send a message via one communications medium selects another more efficacious communications medium if the process of switching between media is easy and the sender knows for certain that the recipient is “present” to the new medium. For example, a sender might place a telephone call instead of spending extra time composing an email message, if the sender somehow knows that the recipient is near the phone. Conversely, a sender writing an email might have resources at hand to ascertain that an intended “buddy” recipient is online for exchange of real-time instant messaging instead of email, but may not want to go to the trouble of finding the system's list of buddies, ascertaining whether the intended buddy recipient is online, leaving the email application, opening the instant messaging application, and initiating an instant messaging conversation. The effort of manually performing these multiple steps of changing communications media, including waiting for a computing device to load software, tends to break the sender's workflow momentum, and may be avoided as not worth the effort.